The Accidental Homesteader

When I bought my “farm” in Moncure, N.C.,
in 1990, I did it simply to live in the woods. I would like to say I was
deliberate. And intentional. But “clueless” is probably a better word. I should
have suspected something when I bought the land and they threw the house in for
free.

At the time Chatham
County was beginning to
think about public waste disposal. Up until then the common practice was to
dump household garbage on the property lines.

Which meant I had an abundance of waste to wade through. As
an avid recycler I sorted a lot of it out. Green glass and clear glass were
piled up separately from heart medicine bottles and worn out shoes. I sold many
tons of scrap metal for about a penny a pound.

My rhythm was simple. I would haul five hundred pounds of
scrap metal to the other side of the county, collect my five dollars, stop by
the stockyard with my empty truck, pay five dollars for a scoop of manure, and
head for home.

It was through garbage that I developed an intimacy with the
land. To this day, when I am walking in the woods, I can often feel that the
ground beneath me is not “right.” And when I stop to explore I frequently
uncover a tin can, or a bedspring packed in clay, or a whitewall tire that is
waiting to be unearthed and taken to our recycling center.

Decades ago it seemed like a daunting task. But now the
place has begun to heal. Chestnut trees drop fruit in an orchard that was once
motor oil and car parts. There is a fig tree which dominates what was once an
appliance pile. Asparagus now grows in the field that was once populated by
plastic tampon applicators.

I would say my gardening efforts are best characterized by
failure, neglect, and surprise. I have uncovered bushels of peppers that I
forgot about—emerging from beneath the weeds—because I stopped mowing when I
smelled peppers.

We are still learning how to eat armfuls of persimmons, and
learning how to enjoy pears. I don’t really even like pears, but in the absence of
chemicals they do really well in the Piedmont of North Carolina.

We’ve been editing this place for over
twenty years, and we have an unruly blend of successes and failures. Some of
our flowers give us marvelous shows. Others succumb to weed, or drought, or
rabbit, or deer pressure.

And while we would best be described as failed homesteaders,
we have managed to launch a couple of sustainable farming enterprises that are
envious in their output. Between Piedmont Biofarm and Edible Earthscapes we
have helped put about six acres of sustainable agriculture into production,
which means that literally tons of food ship into the world every week, year
round.

These two farms are so productive that we are awash with
food. They sell at farmers markets and to fancy restaurants, and they run CSAs
and sell to our local co-op grocery store, Chatham Marketplace.

In some ways our own food cultivation efforts seem
unimportant since we are dwarfed by two successful farm enterprises that we
helped enable. We have had to learn how to eat out of wax covered boxes of
produce, but that has been a small learning curve.

One of the fascinating aspects of our endeavor is how
completely different it is from so many of our compatriots in the
sustainability movement. Many of our friends, members, and colleagues have an
abiding belief in societal collapse. For many it is not a question of “if,” but
merely a question of “when.”

And while many of them are stockpiling beans and rice and
arming themselves against the impending marauding hordes, we are simply
experimenting with banana trees and delighting ourselves with tropical fruit.

One of the things we have accidentally learned is that if
you haul away enough garbage, and replace it with enough organic matter, you
will create fecundity, and food will happen in abundance.

We are accidental homesteaders. We figured out how to power
our previously abandoned house, we figured out how to get water flowing, and we
figured out how to feed ourselves on food that comes from within a ten mile
radius.

That was never our intent. I just wanted to live in the
woods. Everything else was accidental…

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